This sweeping historical narrative chronicles events instrumental in the painful birth of a new nationfrom the Bloody Morning Scout and the massacre at Fort William Henry to the disastrous siege of Quebec, the heroic but lopsided Battle of Valcour Island, the horrors of Oriskany, and the tragedies of Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley massacre and the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition's destruction of the Iroquois homeland in western New York State. Caught in the middle of it all was the Mohawk River Valley. Berleth explores the relationship of early settlers on the Mohawk frontier to the Iroquoian people who made their homes beside the great river. He introduces colonists and native leaders in all their diversity of culture and belief. Dramatic profiles of key participants provide perspectives through which contemporaries struggled to understand events. Sir William Johnson is here first as a shopkeeper, then as a brother Mohawk and militia leader, and lastly as a crown official charged with supervising North American Indian affairs. We meet the frontier ambassador Conrad Weiser, survivor of the Palatine immigration, who agreed not at all with Johnson or his party. And we encounter the young missionary, Samuel Kirkland, as he leaves Johnson's household for a fateful sojourn among the Senecas. Johnson's heirs did much to precipitate the outbreak of violent hostilities along the Mohawk in the first months of the War of Independence. Berleth shows how the Johnson family sought to save their patrimony in the valley just as patriot forces maneuvered to win Native American support. When Joseph Brant rushed Native Americans to war behind the British, it fell to General Philip Schuyler, wealthy scion of an old Albany family, to find a way to protect the Mohawk region from British incursion. His invasion of Canada fails; his tattered army fights at Valcour Island, Ticonderoga, Hubbardton, retreating steadily. Not until on the line of the Mohawk was the enemy stopped.

Gilbert Martin and his new bride Lana, pioneers in the Mohawk Valley, live and protect their land through weather disasters, love and hate and Indian attacks.

Opening Moves -- The First Invasion -- A New British Strategy -- A Question of American Command -- Laying the Groundwork -- The Fall of Fort Ticonderoga -- Defeat, Retreat, Disgrace -- Aftershocks -- Burgoyne Moves South -- The Ordeal of Philip Schuyler -- The Murder of Jane McCrea -- Not to Make a Ticonderoga of It -- Oriskany and Relief -- Cat and Mouse -- Burgoyne's Dilemma -- The Battle of Bennington -- Gates takes Command -- The Battle of Freeman's Farm -- Sir Henry Clinton to the Rescue -- The Battle of Bemis Heights -- Retreat, Pursuit, and Surrender -- British Reassessment -- The Fruits of Victory -- Conclusion: Strategy and Leadership.

"A fast-moving tale of courage, cruelty, hardship, and savagery."--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette In North America's first major conflict, known today as the French and Indian War, France and England--both in alliance with Native American tribes--fought each other in a series of bloody battles and terrifying raids. No confrontation was more brutal and notorious than the massacre of the British garrison of Fort William Henry--an incident memorably depicted in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. That atrocity stoked calls for revenge, and the tough young Major Robert Rogers and his "Rangers" were ordered north into enemy territory to exact it. On the morning of October 4, 1759, Rogers and his men surprised the Abenaki Indian village of St. Francis, slaughtering its sleeping inhabitants without mercy. A nightmarish retreat followed. When, after terrible hardships, the raiders finally returned to safety, they were hailed as heroes by the colonists, and their leader was immortalized as "the brave Major Rogers." But the Abenakis remembered Rogers differently: To them he was Wobomagonda--"White Devil."

In 1634, the Dutch West India Company was anxious to know why the fur trade from New Netherland had been declining, so the company sent three employees far into Iroquois country to investigate. Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert led the expedition from Fort Orange (present-day Albany, NY). His is the earliest known description of the interior of what is today New York State and its seventeenth-century native inhabitants. Van den Bogaert was a keen observer, and his journal is not only a daily log of where the expedition party traveled; it is also a detailed account of the Mohawks and the Oneidas: the settlements, modes of subsistence, and healing rituals. Van den Bogaert’s extraordinary wordlist is the earliest known recorded vocabulary of the Mohawk language. Gehring’s translation and Starna’s annotations provide indispensable material for anthropologists, ethnohistorians, linguists, and anyone with a special interest in Native American studies. Michelson’s current additions to the wordlist of Mohawk equivalents with English glosses (wherever possible) and his expert analysis of the language in the Native American passages offer a valuable new dimension to this edition of the journal.

In September 1755, the most famous Indian in the worldÑa Mohawk leader known in English as King HendrickÑdied in the Battle of Lake George. He was fighting the French in defense of British claims to North America, and his death marked the end of an era in AngloÐIroquois relations. He was not the first Mohawk of that name to attract international attention. Half a century earlier, another Hendrick worked with powerful leaders in the frontier town of Albany. He cemented his transatlantic fame when he traveled to London as one of the Òfour Indian kings.Ó Until recently the two Hendricks were thought to be the same person. Eric Hinderaker sets the record straight, reconstructing the lives of these two men in a compelling narrative that reveals the complexities of the AngloÐIroquois alliance, a cornerstone of BritainÕs imperial vision. The two Hendricks became famous because, as Mohawks, they were members of the Iroquois confederacy and colonial leaders believed the Iroquois held the balance of power in the Northeast. As warriors, the two Hendricks aided Britain against the French; as Christians, they adopted the trappings of civility; as sachems, they stressed cooperation rather than bloody confrontation with New York and Great Britain. Yet the alliance was never more than a mixed blessing for the two Hendricks and the Iroquois. Hinderaker offers a poignant personal story that restores the lost individuality of the two Hendricks while illuminating the tumultuous imperial struggle for North America.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press Nineteen veteran authors, members of the Western Writers of America all, have been collected in this volume of essays detailing the travails and triumphs of the whites who emigrated rest along the Pioneer Trails.

"I'm scared and scarred but I’ve survived" Tom Wilson was raised in the rough-and-tumble world of Hamilton—Steeltown— in the company of World War II vets, factory workers, fall-guy wrestlers and the deeply guarded secrets kept by his parents, Bunny and George. For decades Tom carved out a life for himself in shadows. He built an international music career and became a father, he battled demons and addiction, and he waited, hoping for the lies to cease and the truth to emerge. It would. And when it did, it would sweep up the St. Lawrence River to the Mohawk reserves of Quebec, on to the heights of the Manhattan skyline. With a rare gift for storytelling and an astonishing story to tell, Tom writes with unflinching honesty and extraordinary compassion about his search for the truth. It's a story about scars, about the ones that hurt us, and the ones that make us who we are. From Beautiful Scars: Even as a kid my existence as the son of Bunny and George Wilson seemed far-fetched to me. When I went over it in my head, none of it added up. The other kids on East 36th Street in Hamilton used to tell me stories of their mothers being pregnant and their newborn siblings coming home from the hospital. Nobody ever talked about Bunny's and my return from the hospital. In my mind my birth was like the nativity, only with gnarly dogs and dirty snow and a chipped picket fence and old blind people with short tempers and dim lights, ashtrays full of Export Plain cigarette butts and bottles of rum. Once, when I was about four, I asked Bunny, "How come I don't look anything like you and George? How come you are old and the other moms are young?" "There are secrets I know about you that I’ll take to my grave," she responded. And that pretty well finished that. Bunny built up a wall to protect her secrets, and as a result I built a wall to protect myself.